Center for BioRegional Living

About The Center for Bioregional Living

One of the premier Permaculture teachers and designers in North America with nearly two decades of experience in the field. His passionate and visionary presentation and curriculum has been inspiring and motivating students since his days as an alternative school teacher at Upattinas in Glenmoore, PA. Andrew lived off the grid in West Virginia for 8 years where he designed and built a Permaculture inspired homestead including a 1600 sq ft strawbale house. He moved to Brooklyn in 2007 and has been applying his knowledge to the urban landscape culminating in a Permaculture Design Certification course many consider life changing. He is developing The Center for Bioregional Living in Ellenville, NY with his partner Adriana Magana as a pilot campus for his students, clients and baby daughter Juniper.

Andrew Faust has been practicing permaculture and biodynamics since receiving his Permaculture Design certificate in 1996. Some of our design clients include Ezekiel's Place Retreat Center in Hedgesville, WV, Leaveners Respite Center in Essex, NY, Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Warren, VT, and local businesses and residents. Previous clients include the Gesundheit! Institute in Hillsboro, WV and Camphill Village Kimberton Hills in Chester County, PA. Faust has extensive experience in doing designs for a wide range of climates and habitats including desert, forest and mountain. He is a certified Alternative School Teacher, focusing on Bioregional Education; he instructed at Upattinas Open Community High School for ten years. Faust holds a B.A. in comparative religions from Guilford College.

Adriana is a permaculture designer and certified horticulturalist living in Ellenville, NY. She runs the administrative side of Center for Bioregional Living and renders most of the maps and designs for their growing roster of clients. She is an avid researcher, home-maker, herbalist, nutritionist, gardener, artist, crafter, musician and mother. She formulates most of the family’s herbal medicine and cosmetics and teaches classes on these as well as traditional food topics. She is passionate about natural child rearing and believes in keeping things as simple as possible.

Adriana, aka Dreiky, spent numerous years playing drums, recording and touring with legendary super group Crash Worship. She moved to NY’Cs Lower East Side in 1996 (from San Diego and a brief stay in New Orleans) to squat a building that was then torn down. She moved to Brooklyn after this and for nearly 8 years curated the celebrated underground loft party Happy Birthday Hideout. She started the Hungry March Band with artist Leslie Samuels and a handful of musician friends in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to play at the Mermaid Day Parade in 1997.

Other bands that she has performed (singer, drummer, keyboards, producer) with are: The Turn-Offs, Televised Execution, Morricone Youth, Express Fiesta Glacier, Lycaon Pictus, Sxip Shirey, The Loser’s Lounge and many others. In 2002 she performed Fantastic Light at Roulette in NYC, an experimental opera made possible through a generous grant from the Jerome Foundation. She is now compiling an album of the songs she sings to her young daughter Juniper Amie Faust Magana

Andrew Faust - Founder - Director

Adriana Magana
Co-director-Administrator

Creates regional Infrastructures that are diverse and well adapted to the local ecological,social and geological realities. A bioregion is an area that shares similar soils, climate, and plant and animal communities, they can include several watersheds. As a planning tool it dates to the 1920's when they were devised as physiographic provinces combining the sciences of physical geology and geography. Today they are being used as a regulatory base map by the EPA and the DEP and The Nature Conservancy. We are expanding the concept to create regionally appropriate models for economic development using Permaculture design.

Bioregional economies address:

-- Social justice
-- Responsible economy
-- Land use equity
-- Sustainable agriculture
-- Restoration ecology

It is about the development of agricultural practices in a context with a deeper look at the landscape of the region, appropriate to the geography and heritage of the place. It is about accountable stewardship of urban cityscapes to dramatically reduce the enormous waste generated by those spaces and to create positive relationships between cities and outlying rural communities. Andrew Faust asks, “How do we retrofit this infrastructure to be more ecologically sound and socially responsible?” He seeks the answer to this question in permaculture, articulating the interconnectedness of ecology and economy and describing tangible, simple, and yet somehow revolutionary urban and rural designs.

What is Bioregional Design?

Maps of Bioregions of North America and the North East

Click here to view more information about all our Permaculture Courses and Workshop Programs

917-584-4588